Science (non) Fiction

My grandfather, John ‘Jack’ Burns passed away this morning in Kaukauna WI - my parents had luckily arrived less than 12 hours before. My brother and I will be flying up Monday for the visitation and funeral, along with lots of other extended family members - please keep my entire family in your prayers as we all come to grips with this loss. I don’t think it will really hit me til we get up there, I’m mostly not feeling much of anything right now. How do you deal with loss like this? of someone to whom you’re related but have little other than blood in common? Your prayers are coveted.

My grandfather is back in nursing care and has been unresponsive all day today, and he’s on oxygen - his mental functioning is going rapidly downhill, and my parents have started the drive up to WI tonight. Please pray for Grandpa, and for my parents as they do what will be a looooong drive under potentially very emotional conditions.

I finally caved and filled out my Myspace profile (mostly at the urging, or pushing, of Dawn ). We got addicted one night trying to find old schoolmates from Mars Hill - so much fun to see where people are, who they’re with, if they’ve had babies, etc. I’ve found lots of old sorority sisters and other friends from college - it’s amazing how many people I’ve lost contact with - it’s nice to re-connect, if only on a kinda superficial level for now. If you have a profile and you’re not on my ‘friends’ list, let me know and we can be Myspace buddies!

OK, I’m going to run through this fast to get caught up so I can start fresh.

My best friend from college was here visiting for two weeks and just left today We had a really good time, got to catch up a lot and did a lot of talking and laughing. We spent a day and a couple nights back at Mars Hill, visiting with professors and getting caught up on the new campus gossip. There’s a new young biology professor, and a new science/math building in the works. Going back really feels like going home in a sense - it’s where I started to formulate the ideas about my future, where I can still go to get guidance. Some of our old profs organized a party for us on Friday night, which was a great time to chat with everybody - it’s fun and kinda wierd to interact with some of them as adults, and not students. This does not mean that we could call them by their first names - that’s still too wierd. hehehe.

It was also a good time for catching up with old friends back here - all three of us from senior year got together a couple times and laughed A LOT! And we all had dinner last night with a cute guy from college (just for you, John!), and it was fun to be back in the college mindset, even for a night - we got lots of looks from restaurant patrons due to the loud laughing going on at our table

We’re closing in on finishing up my paper - it will be such a relief to have it off my desk, and start to make some progress on the next paper’s work. Once it’s wrapped up, I’ve got to talk to my boss about finding some opportunities to get some teaching experience. After talking to some of my old profs, that was their biggest piece of advice, to get some documented teaching experience - I’m hoping with that in hand, I’ll have a leg up on any competition for teaching jobs.

My grandfather is back in the nursing home, after being released back to his assisted living apartment for a couple weeks. He’s on oxygen because of his congestive heart failure issues from when he was in the hospital last time. And he’s apparently quite confused/agitated, which, while not completely out of the ordinary, is causing some problems with family getting a hold of him and figuring out what’s going on. Please pray for him if you think about it - I think at least some of us will be spending Christmas up there assuming he’s still in nursing care.

We’re starting back with nursery duty this coming Sunday - I’m very excited about being back with my babies again after most of the summer off. Is it wrong that I’m more excited about taking care of the babies than about most things in my week? What does that say about the rest of my life?

Ever since I watched the episode of Gilmore Girls where Luke and Lorelai dance at his sister’s wedding, I’ve been fascinated with this song - it took me a while to find it, bit I finally did a couple weeks ago. Other than smell, music is the best way of triggering memories for me, and everytime I hear this song, I can picture the way they dance across the town square, the way Lorelai was surprised by Luke’s wanting to dance. I remember really wanting to be Lorelai at this point in the show, in a way that I hadn’t really wanted to before, dancing across the floor in a nice dress, with an adorable guy who can dance well.

So here you go, ‘Reflecting Light’ by Sam Phillips:

Now that I’ve worn out, I’ve worn out the world
I’m on my knees in fascination
Looking through the night
And the moon’s never seen me before
But I’m reflecting light

I rode the pain down
Got off and looked up
Looked into your eyes
The lost open windows
All around
My dark heart lit up the skies

Now that I’ve worn, I’ve worn out the world
I’m on my knees in fascination
Looking through the night
And the moon’s never seen me before
But I’m reflecting light

Give up the ground
Under your feet
Hold on to nothing for good
Turn and run at the mean times
Chasing you
Stand alone and misunderstood

And now that I’ve worn, I’ve worn out the world
I’m on my knees in fascination
Looking through the night
And the moon’s never seen me before
But I’m reflecting light

Do you have any friendships that are so easy to slip back into, like a really comfy pair of PJs? A relationship with someone who knows you so well that even after months away, it’s like you’ve not been apart at all?

One of my best friends from college is here visiting this week and next, and while we’ve both changed a lot over the last 8 years since we first met when I picked her up from the airport before we left for freshman scholarship orientation at Mars Hill, we can still pick up pretty much right where we left off whenever we saw each other last. (In this case, when I was out in WA visiting her last fall.) We’ve gone through many oscillations in our relationship, but we always come back to the point of treasuring our frienship, whatever it’s flaws.

This is not the case with all of my friendships, as is probably the case with some of yours. Some frienships require so much emotional energy that spending time around them leaves me exhausted. While I’m very open to the possibility that friendships can be great grounds for ministry to someone’s very real emotional and physical needs, sometimes too many of those kinds of relationships can completely zap my energy for any kind of relationship. And I do love helping my friends when they’re struggling; it’s only when that energy drainage becomes the predominant theme of the friendship that I begin to struggle.

But that is not the case with my friendship with Dawn - we certainly argued in college (mostly about typical roommate stuff) and we don’t always see eye-to-eye on everything, but our foundation for friendship is pretty solidly based in years of knowledge about each other, years spent talking about anything and everything, the boys we liked, the ones we didn’t, the craziness of a particular professor, etc. Unlike so many other relationships, I feel like I can be completely myself around her, and I hope she feels likewise - we give each other room to be ourselves.

So here’s to friendships, old, new, struggling or thriving - how boring life would be without them!

Sandra McCracken has a new CD coming out (or already out for those of us who pre-ordered ) called Gravity/Love, and it’s fabulous! Lots of different sounds across the album, and some new favorites are emerging for me - lots of songs about longing and change and other deep things, expressed best the way Sandra does. This is one of my favorites, mostly cause of the lyrics - I have a couple others that I like better melodically, but this one hits me every time I listen.

Broken Cup

Looks for autumn, looks for spring,
they’re gonna make you look just like a magazine,
fickle fashion, we are bought and sold,
by next season she leaves you in the cold.

And maybe all I want is nothing you can sell,
pills and magazines,
turn the pages, pour the water,
I can’t seem to get enough…
Like a broken cup.

Empty pockets, empty dream,
all the promises that spill from the glowing screens,
wealth and riches on a little plastic card,
all you every wanted with a low APR.

Maybe all I want is nothing you can sell,
pills and magazines,
turn the pages, pour the water,
I can’t seem to get enough…
Like a broken cup.

And you can ask, you can spin,
you can weave the lies right in,
I’ve had enough,
gonna wash my hands clean of the 21st century.

Some light reading, stop light ahead,
You gotta give me something that will last longer than that,
story like Shakespeare was meant to stick around,
sitcom romance just wears me out.

Maybe all I want is nothing you can sell,
pills and magazines,
turn the pages, pour the water,
I can’t seem to get enough…
Like a broken cup.

OK, so I had an MRI on Friday, and I met with the surgeon again today to discuss the results. To make a long story short, there didn’t appear to be any tearing of the meniscus - he did, however, think that I transiently dislocated my knee, meaning that the patella popped out and then back into the joint, which is better than a complete dislocation. But it still managed to cause a contusion on the bone, and an inflamed ligament. So basically, I don’t have to have surgery, and he gave me some exercises to build up my quads, and I’m supposed to check back with him in 4-6 weeks if it’s still bothering me. Which seems like a long time, but hopefully it will go quickly and I can slowly work up to running another race, maybe a 5K this time though…

So thanks for the prayers and thoughts - I appreciate all the concern

OK, since Kari asked for it, and I clearly need to tell a slightly more happy tale of my travels, I will here recount the events that occured while waiting for my connecting flight in Dallas/Fort Worth on the way to California (before any of the aforementioned medical issues arose).

So I was sitting at my gate in the lovely DFW airport, waiting through a long layover on a Wednesday afternoon. Now the airport had wireless internet, but I had to pay, and I was initially too cheap to pay, so I was occupying myself with reading and people-watching. And I began to notice that all around me there were a lot of women, more than one would normally see in proportion to the number of men. And while there were a lot of variations in the size, shape, ethnicities and age of these women, they all seemed to have one thing in common - they were all carrying at least one large, garishly pink MARY KAY bags! And as I looked closer at the women, I noticed that many of them were wearing lapel pins for MK, and many had multiple bags (apparently from the different generations of MK).

Now what you’ll notice I’m not saying is that all of these women had stunning makeup, makeup that was so natural that you could barely tell they were wearing any - oh no, my friends, that was not the case. These women were all around me, and while I was not really looking like a million bucks myself, there were very few of them that I would have wanted advising me about the proper colors/application of makeup. I haven’t seen that much poorly applied makeup since high school, and these women were WAY out of high school. (And why are there no male MK salespeople? is it kinda like having a male OBGYN?)

Apparently, there was a conference/meeting in Dallas that had just finished up, and they were all scattering back home across the country, so several of them ended up on my flight to CA. And on that flight, while I was waiting in the aisle of the plane to use the lavatory (trying to avoid getting fussed at by the flight attendants), there were two of them comparing notes in the seats in front of me while I was standing there. And I kept getting evil looks from one of them, like she thought I was going to steal her trade secrets of mass marketing to the stay-at-home mom population or world domination through excessive application of eye shadow. That’s the real reason I was on that plane, folks!

(oh, and when I got on my last flight of this trip, back to NC, I was putting my bag in the overhead compartment, and what was there next to the empty space for my bookbag? that’s right, a pink MARY KAY bag! I swear, they’re stalking me!)

Would it be enough to tell you that in the last two weeks I’ve been in two different urgent care centers in two different states? or that I’ve seen over 7 different medical professionals in the same time? or that I’ve had my luggage lost and hotel reservations misplaced? no? you want more? ok…well…

I arrived in California, raring to go for the last part of Wedding Week 2006, including on Thursday an almost full-day bachelorette party walking around downtown San Francisco, ice skating, and eating pizza late into the night. By the end of that, I ended up in a lot of pain and ended up in the urgent care center the next morning, having been diagnosed with a cyst that needed to be dealt with (while everyone else got their nails done, no less!). The rehearsal and rehearsal dinner that night were lovely, and after another visit to urgent care the following morning, and hair appointments, and pictures in 100+ heat outside and in the church (with NO A/C!), Frances and Jonathan were joined in marriage in a beautiful service.

The reception was air-conditioned luckily, and I had lots of bubbly apple juice, and the music was great, and I took it easy with no dancing til the very end, due to the aforementioned health issues. But one of the groomsmen asked me to dance for the last dance, and I figured, ‘what harm could I do in 3 minutes on the dance floor?’ - well, apparently a lot, cause as he (the groom’s twin brother, by the way) went to dip me at the end, my shoes slipped, and, well, we both ended up on the floor, but only after I heard a very loud, very ominous ‘pop’ from my left knee. It immediately swelled up to about 3 times its normal size, and was extremely difficult to handle putting weight on it. Since I was already going to the urgent care place the next morning anyway, they XRayed the knee, found nothing broken, but it was too swollen for them to tell anything about what was wrong. So I ended up with a knee immobilizer (brace) and crutches, a dash to pick up a refill prescription for pain meds, and almost didn’t make my flight out of SF to go to Montana for the conference at MSU.

Upon arrival in Bozeman MT, my bags were not on my flight (the power was also out in the airport - are you starting to see a pattern here?) - they didn’t arrive at the motel til almost midnight (the motel is a whole other story ). Basically, I had to go to an urgent care center in Bozeman every day I was there until the last day of the conference, which was not made any easier by the fact that I was either on crutches or in a brace the whole time. The conference ended up being quite different than we expected, but still somewhat helpful I hope.

On the way back, I had to stop over in San Francisco, and after a debacle with hotel reservations, I finally had a room for the night and got in bed early, cause I had to be at the airport at 5am the next day. That flight left late, which made me miss my connection in Dallas and delayed my arrival in NC by 3 hours.

Now that I’m back, I’ve finally been to an orthpedic surgeon, who thinks that I’ve torn a meniscus (which is better than tearing a ligament) - so I had an MRI tonight to see the tear, and I’ll talk to

Lessons learned:

~ I hate United, and I love American

~ Sometime in my life, I WILL fly first class!

~ As a friend mentioned when I recounted the whole story to her, ‘you don’t normally attract this amount of drama’, and I though ‘I KNOW!’ - I try to avoid drama like crazy, but this trip it seemed to be stalking me.

~ As messy as things were, God was clearly involved, as I had great medical care, and the urgent care centers were always within a couple blocks of my hotel at the time.

~ I realized how much I like to be in control of every part of my life, and given how impossible me being in control was on this trip, I had a really hard time - I didn’t have a car, or any control over my schedule, and I was in a different time zone so getting a hold of people back home was hard - it really forced me to rely on the ‘kindness of strangers’ (or people I knew) - and as much as I hate to admit that I need help, people really came through to help me through the whole trip - whether it was the bridesmaid’s mom who drove me around and picked up gauze at the drugstore (Thanks Maggie and Kathy!), or the family friend who picked up a backpack and various assorted pharmacy stuff before my flight out of CA, or just people being concerned about my wellbeing after hearing what was going on. I don’t know if it will be any easier next time I need to let go and let others help me, but I know I need to learn to accept help from the people I love. As my mom said while this whole thing was going on, I need to be willing to accept the ministry of others in my life. So, while I hope that I won’t need to do it anytime soon, I will hopefully be more open to receiving that help when the time comes.